Weekend polls show strong support for Rudd

Updated
February 25, 2012 09:19:00

The latest Newspoll shows that Kevin Rudd is the preferred PM over both Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard, but voters are split over whether the Labor Party should change leaders. Newspoll chief executive Martin O'Shannessy speaks to Elizabeth Jackson.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: To the story that everybody's talking about this weekend, and former foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd could well wake up this morning "a very happy little Vegemite".

A series of polls published in today's papers all say the same thing - Kevin Rudd is more popular with Australians than Julia Gillard.

According to the latest Newspoll, which was conducted over the past two days, Mr Rudd is the preferred prime minister over both Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard.

The only good news for the Prime Minister is that according to one poll, Australians are split over whether the Labor Party should change leaders - 48 per cent in favour of change, 47 per cent against.

The 103 members of the Labor caucus will of course meet on Monday morning at 10 o'clock Canberra time to choose between the two.

Martin O'Shannessy is the chief executive of Newspoll; I asked him to about the latest set of figures.

Martin O'Shannessy, just how far ahead of Julia Gillard is Kevin Rudd?

MARTIN O'SHANNESSY: On the question of who'd be the better person to lead the Labor Party, right now we have 53 per cent of voters supporting Kevin Rudd and 30 per cent of voters supporting Julia Gillard.

So he's a pretty long way ahead and really that's just a continuation of the trend we saw in fact over the entire time that we've been measuring this - we've done this six times since Feb, 2010 - there's always been a lead for Kevin Rudd, sometimes six points but at the moment of course that number out over 20 points and that's where it's been since the end of last year.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Does it appear from the figures as though most people approve of Mr Rudd's decision to take on the Prime Minister at this point?

MARTIN O'SHANNESSY: That's a hard call because a lot of these interviews will have been done before yesterday afternoon, when of course the foreign minister agreed to, or announced his challenge. But there seems to be a sense that people will support Kevin Rudd. That's certainly has been the narrative that his supporters would have us believe and of course his angle is that he's the guy to beat Tony Abbott; the poll tends to support that view at this time.

MARTIN O'SHANNESSY: If we look at the question of who'd be the better prime minister, we have 48 for Kevin Rudd, 40 for Tony Abbot, 12 undecided. So, that's definitely - looks like a lead, the margin of error on the poll is around 5 per cent but I think it's pretty clear that that is about the lead Kevin Rudd had when he was deposed.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Martin, how does that compare to Julia Gillard?

MARTIN O'SHANNESSY: Julia Gillard when compared to Tony Abbot trails him as well. At the moment we have 34 per cent saying that Julia Gillard would make the better prime minister, 43 for Tony Abbott, 23 yet uncommitted - a fairly big number but there's another big lead there for Tony Abbott over Gillard.

So what we see is that Julia Gillard doesn't compare well to either of the other putative prime ministers on that question.